Jesus!

A friend sent me an article by Mark Morford about mega-churches, which seem to be sprouting up in middle tier cities around the country like those rings of mushrooms that sprout in your yard overnight. If only they were as satisfying to squish.

Because of my fucking bizarre upbringing and my unfortunate familiarity with all things church and all things evangelical Christian I feel perfectly qualified to sound off some of my opinions about the current religious climate in our country. If you question my authority on this subject I am willing to remind you that I was homeschooled for most of my formative years by my rabid evangelical Christian parents in the South, I am both a PK (pastor's kid) and an MK (missionary kid), I spent a full four years of my life singing and praying in a different church every Sunday and Wednesday night accross the bottom of the US raising support for my parent's mission work, I have signed True-Love-Waits cards, and I honestly believed at 15 that I would prefer courtship to dating.

That said, I think that Christians in this country feel that they are living in a besmirched utopia. They feel(and especially under this administration) that they have been persecuted for a very long time and that America is rightfully theirs. They have been denied their birthright of a perfect, whitewashed, wealthy, privileged, patriarchal, regimented country for a good 50 years. Now is the time that their reward has come and they are taking back what they should have had all along.

Evangelical Christians believe that homosexuals and adulturers and poor people and immigrants and drug-dealers and young pregnant girls are all personal assaults against them, that these people are responsible for ruining the perfect, pure, safe, and holy place they want to live in. They are driven by a powerful and self-righteous fury. With a born-again Christian in the White House they have an opportunity to strike back at the thieves who stole their paradise. This is why they use terminology like "attacking family values" when they speak about homosexuality or sex-ed programs. Because they really do feel attacked, like someone broke into their house and took their family silver.

These are transparent beliefs to the people that hold them. I don't think that contemporary evangelical Christians sit around feeling conciously angry at poor people for ruining their perfect world. I think that they feel angry with life's difficulties in the same small way that most people feel angry that life hands them a mixed bag, and they verbalize or solidify that idea by saying that they long for the kingdom of heaven and the return of Christ. While degenerates like you and me deal with this frustration by having a good meal, fucking, smoking a cigarette, and calling it a day, Christians act on all that pent-up frustration by trying to codify or legislate the behavior that they feel would create that perfect "kingdom of heaven" in America. They feel that they are righteous for wanting this, and they magnify their own little human frustrations at not having that perfect life into the holy anger of a righteous God striking at the heart of evil: attacking homosexuals, promiscuity, independant business owners, porn. You name it, they hate it.

Megachurches are the most practical marriage of all that is American and all that is evangelical Christian at this point in time: bigger, better, corporate-minded group identities with the added zest of spiritual consequences stretching into the vast reaches of eternity. These churches are super efficient means of getting what these people want. Like the ginormous corporations that we see today, the congregations are the shareholders who also consume the products. What would be better than to surround yourself with thousands of people who feel the same way, think the same way, and consume the same way. Strength in numbers. Christians feel more powerful with every year that Bush has been in office, they feel that they are making it happen, getting what they deserve, snatching America out of the hands of the homosexuals and immigrants and academics who clearly have it out for them.

The end will come, eventually. We've seen it with Enron. Mega-churches and the Christian right will mushroom to the point that they become too big to sustain the whitewashed illusion, and then they will pop. It always happens. But until then those of us with friends on the inside will still have to listen to the grocery lists of Christians losing weight on the Maker's Diet.